


this is what you want.

by nowavailableinthesky



Series: where are the days of Tobias? [1]
Category: Warrior Nun (TV)
Genre: TW: Homophobia, and I guess tw for the whole Catholic church?, part one of (probably) three, welcome to my character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26965216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowavailableinthesky/pseuds/nowavailableinthesky
Summary: He names himself Thomas, after the apostle who questioned and who believed.He has a lot of questions.---a character study of Kristian Schaefer.
Series: where are the days of Tobias? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1967779
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14





	this is what you want.

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warnings for: homophobia, the Catholic Church on its bs, and minor character death. series title from Second Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke; fic title from The Order of Death by Public Image Ltd.
> 
> been crying in the club since I was 13, welcome

CANON I.- If any one saith, that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord; or that they are more, or less, than seven, to wit, Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Order, and Matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament; let him be anathema

**_Baptism_ **

It’s about faith and reason, his mother says, whispering in his ears the biblical bedtime stories. No, we do not know that Adam and Eve wore leaves, we do not know that the angel Jacob wrestled was flesh and being, with the ability to dance on a pin (for dancing on pins is just the sort of thing angels do).

But we believe, and belief has chemistry to it. An equation. I matter, and you do, and we are imbued with divine purpose.

A mother of one faith and a father of another is a stain he cannot wash off. His mother stands alone in the church the day he is baptized, her tiny figure (he imagines) dwarfed by Father Isaias. She is small and impeccably dressed, standing in the side chapel with its ceiling of blue tiles specked with stars, her son crying as water washes over his head. 

He imagines her lonely walk home from Saint Agnes. Imagines his father listening to the radio while he waits in the kitchen. Over the many coming years Kristian will walk that path but it is never lonely. He will not be able to remember a single Sunday spent without his mother beside him.

**_Eucharist_ **

A large part of him is disappointed when that first host touches his tongue and remains unleavened bread. He’s read stories of minor miracles, doubters who turned to faith after tasting—suddenly—rich iron as they drank from the chalice. Or! He thinks of those whose eyes were opened to visions of heaven, rafters of the church transformed to clouds and glory, the sound of angelic choirs drifting—faintly, yet clearly—down to earth. 

But the painted ceiling stays as it is, a faded and lesser beauty. He chews and swallows, then blesses himself with the sign of the cross. (Of course, he still believes in transubstantiation. _This is my body, this is my blood…_ It is one of the great mysteries of the Church, he’s been told. As much as he’s eager to know the science of it, it is the gap between the known and the impossible—named _faith_ —that calls to him.) (…and anyway, he thinks transubstantiation is like the water cycle, or something. Different modes of divine being. It’s a theory he’s working on.)

Despite all he learns in his Catholic schooling it only gets more complicated. The more he has words for, the less he understands. Miracles cloaked in language…He pulls phrases together and tears them apart like they're an endless series of thin veils over the truth but it’s done out of earnestness, it’s sincere. He thinks he might become a philosopher someday—one of the great Doctors of the Church. Maybe figuring all this out could be his service to God, his personal march toward sainthood.

**_Confirmation_ **

He names himself Thomas, after the apostle who questioned and who believed. 

He has a _lot_ of questions.

What he wonders most is whether a mark on the soul lasts. In school he was told it is permanent. You were baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; through the waters of baptism and the oil of the chrism, you are forever marked in both this world and the next. He wonders at a God who _chooses_ to name and separate the wheat from the chaff, those who've had their foreheads smeared with oil from those who haven't. It seems unfair, given the consequences. He’s told that it _is_ fair and is given books to read proving that this is right and just. (When he prays each night he thanks God for letting him be born to a mother who had him baptized as an infant. He tries his best not to think of his father and the few other non-Catholics he knows, and what will happen to them after they die.)

He becomes an altar server as soon as he’s old enough. He has wanted to be one of those boys dressed in white robes for almost as long as he can remember. It's an honor and a great responsibility to carry the glass cruet, to pour holy water over Father’s hands—to bring him the bread and wine that will become Christ’s body, Christ’s blood. 

It feels like being let in on a secret every time he walks into the sacristy before Mass. He's privy to this, the behind the scenes bustle of the sacristan preparing wafers and wine as Father Isaias puts on his vestments and complains loudly about rugby scores. Father’s movements are practiced and sure, smoothing out the stole before pulling the chasuble over his head. The colors he wears each week change from violet to white, green, and red throughout the liturgical year.

Kristian himself wears only white. He fumbles his way through the ritual of putting on an alb the first few times. His hands can’t seem to find the trick to tying the rope around his waist. Another boy—Edward, who is three years older and much taller than Kristian—takes over for him and patiently shows him how to fold the rope in two, lay the doubled end over top, then twist twice and pull the rope through. Kristian feels his heart pounding in his chest, his breath short. Try as he might to replicate the older boy’s efforts his hands only shake.

It is the first time Kristian suspects something might be wrong.

**_Penance/Reconciliation_ **

He is sent to his uncle’s in America for a summer and it is there that he learns of the brute force of the church. He is young and studious, arrives on the farm with a duffle bag full of books of all sorts dragging in the dirt. His uncle says little, and his wife just about the same. The kids, Kristian’s cousins, are loud. They pay him little attention—but to say he is left peacefully alone is inaccurate. Rather, he feels scrutiny in oddly-timed silences, in the spaces where he finds himself excluded. So it is he's taught he must pick himself apart before others can do the job for him. It is the only way to be let in.

It's here, too, that he learns the indicators of true manhood, of masculinity. It is in the farmhands who work the land and make vulgar jokes. It is in the way they spit, they turn, wrap arms around one another, punch and slap and grope and it means…something, but not the thing Kristian feels, replaying it in his memory at night in the attic loft.

He learns sexuality. He learns shame. He hides himself under covers and makes use of careful timing and locked doors. 

He is discovered once, an instance seared into his mind—the only time he did not double- and triple-check his preparations. His aunt does not knock as she walks in and then, and then…then it is the two of them, frozen in a slow trickle of seconds and silence, oh _God_ , he has never heard a louder silence than what she in her shock and he in his shame cannot manage to voice. She opens her mouth once, closes it. Then:

“Do _not_ do that in my house ever again. Do you hear me?” Her face is contorted in disgust. 

He nods. It’s all he can do. 

“Clean up and wash those sheets immediately. You’ll be late for dinner.” Then the door clicks shut behind her. He is left alone with shaking knees and a roaring vertigo enveloping his head. When he is able to stand again, he does what he’s been told.

Ever after, that summer and upon the return home, fear of discovery eats at him. Still, it is not enough to stay his impulses. It does not stop him from daydreaming about the boy down the street with dark eyes, long lashes, and a smile that flips Kristian’s heart right around in his chest.

His imagination expands. (His soul shrinks.)

And so gradually, stumbling on the word, he practices saying it. He knows to keep it in will damn him but to say it out loud might kill him. I have sinned in my room, in my mind, in the private moments I can steal. I've prayed to be anything other than what I am, and still I am, and still I have given in. How can you tell me this brilliant, beautiful boy is not the holy being he seems? I can almost feel his skin under my lips, his body on mine…if fire purifies, what does lust do? Is this not also love? I promise. _Please_. I just want to know what it feels like.

When he brings it up to a priest during confession—not to Father Isaias, he is careful to visit a parish several towns over—he is absolved and given the task of reciting one hundred Our Fathers. He is also given a bookmarked copy of the Catechism to read from cover to cover. When opened it falls to an underlined passage, the words hitting like sledgehammers (they're supposed to):

_Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.' They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity._

_Under no circumstances can they be approved._

It's a relief, the pain he feels reading it. Pain means forgiveness, atonement. Pain means he’s not lost, not yet—there is the promise of salvation, if he only...

Tongue heavy, he says, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. _”_

He says, “I am a homosexual,” and resolves never to touch himself again nor look at men with longing in his heart.

(You are burdened with a heavy cross. You have no choice but to name your sin and carry it.)

**_Holy Orders_ **

There is a certain science to it. Cause and effect. Aquinas, how many angels on your pin? It’s a silly question. He asks anyway. Why would angels dance? For what cause? How? Somewhere along the thread of questions there must be—like gold glittering at the bottom of a pan—clear evidence of divinity.

His questions carry him to his university library and it is there that he stumbles onto archives as a field of study. While balancing a stack of books on the way out, he notices there’s an advert posted to a bulletin board for a student trainee position in the archives. When he calls the number on the advert he is, quite frankly, thinking mostly (with quiet and profound despair) of his nearly-bare pantry.

Upon showing up he finds the archives are far from quiet and are certainly not dusty. Those are the first myths dispelled from whatever romantic vision he’s unconsciously conjured over the years from secondhand sources. Next is the notion that he, like some long-ago scribe, is duty-sworn to transcribe and preserve truth. The truth is, truth varies. Some things are written down, some aren’t, and history is largely an accident of preservation.

Still, in these pages are real lives. Dubious as his belief may be, here are men and women of faith who held a choice on their tongues all their lives and never once considered spitting it back out. They praised God for the gift of bitter wine, and found a way to make of every pain a blessing. Some penance, an offering. ( _Is it a matter of perspective?_ He asks himself. _Is that what I lack?_ To believe, to doubt and yet soldier on, seems an insurmountable obstacle some days. It is a great stone weight at the foot of his bed getting bigger with each morning.)

While processing a collection he comes across an account of a Sister who ministered to the poor in a busy city, her neatly penned record of the students’ grades and confirmation dates, and a parish census. One of the pupils in the school she ran later became a famous playwright—she appears in his work, too, in a brief line in a series of plays about the playwright’s childhood. He also finds an account that is secondhand twice over in another Sister’s journal, writing of the mother of one of the students who called the nun "the walkingest woman I’ve ever seen.” She writes, too, of a conversation her Sister had with the mother on a sidewalk a few short days after a homeless man had been found dead a few steps from where they stood, the most exciting and tragic thing to happen near the convent in at least a week.

The story of one woman told three ways, and in reading these accounts he is a participant in yet another telling. He is there, briefly, on the sidewalk next to two women talking—one in a servant’s outfit, the other in long, black robes—of the terrible news, both with calloused hands and too much left to do, sacrificing efficiency for some time with one another.

Kristian turns yellowed pages and he falls a little in love.

**_Anointing of the Sick_ **

What is it you want? The thing itself, or the possibility of it?

Kristian dreams of heaven. It is multicolored flame, it is pain with _reason_ behind it, it is ecstasy. To be carved in two might not be so bad if it were God’s will and if God’s will could be understood perfectly. Short of that understanding, he will accept a miracle.

There is no miracle.

His mother’s coffin is—he thinks—awfully small. Logically he knows that coffins come in a standard size but he cannot erase the association in his mind between his tiny mother's body and this wooden bed she lies in, will lie in until the end of days.

 _This is my body, this is my blood_. He stares at his arms for weeks afterward and remembers her wasted limbs, remembers her blank gaze, last breath rattling loud in the sterilized air. Barely a minute goes by without remembering. In the shower he looks at his thighs, at his feet such a long way down. He pictures himself in the grave beside her, all his body and being slowly withering away into bone and dust, into whatever is after. 

Once, he was sure of after. He was a young man determined to become a saint, fervently believing he could live up to near-impossible standards of grace and godly service. Once, he _believed_ —and that's the full sentence.

He doesn't abandon faith so much as it feels like retreating down a very long hallway. Inside himself, a door closes. (The door is still there.)

When he returns to the stacks he is a quieter man than before. Words blur before his eyes. He reads of divine intervention, devotion and faith, reads of a forgotten woman named Areala and a gifted halo that brought life after death— _this_ life. He dismisses it. The trouble with miracles, he decides, is not necessarily the mystery of them. Much in the world is and remains inexplicable. The trouble with miracles is the math of them. Not the randomness, but the scarcity. 

What is the material and anatomy of a miracle? Where is it found? If there is some unknown and unknowable equation by which God, in his infinite grace and mercy, bestows upon the world all that is good—where the fuck did He get his numbers from? The hand that wrote the equation lets it stand, and lets us suffer. _That_ is inexplicable.

**_Matrimony_ **

You are married to your guilt, you are married to your sin. Yes, even now. My cross and I, till death do us part…he chuckles at the thought. Christmas cards and wish-you-wells sent from his address, studio photographs of himself and that eternal companion, the heavy wood strapped to his back. Signed, sealed, and stamped with a drop of stigmata. _Write soon, God bless! You are in our prayers._

Stealing precious items and documents is a small thing at first. What happens is he is short of money and takes a few things (small, unnoticeable) of moderate value home from the Vatican archives and, after careful research, finds ways to sell them. Then, despite his efforts, he is one day simply far too late paying the rent on his tiny apartment and is locked out, key useless. He swears and hits the wall. A man emerges from the shadows. Kristian notices the line of his body first, lean, dark button down revealing chest hair. And strong shoulders, and hands— _oh_ , dark spots on the knuckles. Wound turned scab turned scar. Kristian shivers.

They speak over small dishes and two glasses of water in a quiet corner of a nearby bar. Kristian watches the man (whom he's learned is a priest), who watches the liquor that lines the walls. Kristian notices his hunger and admires his restraint. 

The man—a Father Vincent—offers a way out, saying that the cartel has taken notice of his sales (Kristian shivers again, this time for an entirely different reason). The cartel has need for a new kind of collateral, Vincent says, and meanwhile he has a benefactor who is willing to pay a generous sum for Kristian’s skill in research and his valuable access to restricted collections in the Vatican archives. 

Kristian agrees. What else can he do? The power that comes with knowledge cuts many ways.

Two years later they're discovered, but it’s all right. They’ve been careful. Nothing can be traced back to Vincent whose ever-unspecified position within the church’s hierarchy—as well as the watchful eye of his benefactor—protects him. As for Kristian, rumors abound but nothing can be definitively proven. He is permitted to step down, meaning he is relieved of his duties and told that all contact with the media is strongly discouraged. 

Newly jobless, upon Vincent’s suggestion he applies for a consulting position with the founder and scientific director of ARQ-Tech who—for unknown reasons soon made clear—turns out to be quite eager to hire a moderately disgraced former Vatican archivist with years’ worth of insider knowledge. He, likewise, is fascinated with her life’s work. In Salvius he sees, not to be trite, salvation. A cruel salvation. When she succeeds the coin that hangs in the air inside his soul will fall at last and if it lands perfectly balanced on its end, so be it. _God_ —after all these years he just needs it to hit the ground.

Faith, and doubt. The physical material of Truth. The Ark takes shape slowly and he plays his part—no Doctor or philosopher, but fervent nevertheless. (He tastes new words on his tongue, surrounded by lab technicians who speak in terminology miles above his head. He gets dust and dirt in all his clothes. He takes history in his hands not to preserve it, but to destroy it in service of something more.)

God help him, Kristian _hopes_.

**Author's Note:**

> let's get deep for a minute! this is an exorcism of sorts. it's me dragging my own many-years-old, guilt-riddled, scared, so-deep-inside-me-she’s-nearly-forgotten self kicking to the surface and saying to her, ‘hey—hey, babe. shhh. I’m gonna love you, okay? I’m gonna love you. you don’t have to find the words to ask for it, and you do not need to be forgiven.’ 
> 
> put another way: it’s to explain the wasteland behind me & why I still move through the wreckage. for any of y'all who have been or may be in that wreckage, too—I got you.
> 
> any old way. thanks for reading! catch ya later  
> —yours, bean


End file.
